Title: Cyberpunk Edgerunners II
Author(s): Kai Ikarashi / Bartosz Sztybor
Publisher: Trigger / CD Projekt Red
Year: 2026
Deciding against a repeat of series one, I watched all ten episodes of series two the night they dropped. That might sound like a binge, but at approximately five hours, it’s a breeze compared to the runtime of one of those Béla Tarr movies my schooling tells me I should like. But this has cyborgs! And stunning animation! And boobs! And it’s just as existentially nightmarish and socio-politically incisive as any depressing Eastern European flick you’ll find! How anyone could say that isn’t the best use of an evening is beyond me.
I don’t want to spoil anything about this brand new series, which does limit what I can say other than, “go watch it immediately”, but it’s an overwhelmingly beautiful exploration of some overwhelmingly upsetting material (just like series one was). I think “cyberpunk dystopia” is 100% The Worst Dystopia™, for my sensibilities, meaning that it’s the most deeply chilling of all our social nightmare options. Maybe that means it’s The Best Dystopia™, since it’s the most effective at making me feel like everything’s impossibly fucked…
Either way, that fuckedness is there in all cyberpunk media (William Gibson himself even referrs to tracking a “fuckedness quotient” in a New Yorker profile from a few years back), but in the stuff that really hits me, there’s also an impossible, aching beauty, a beauty that’s completely inseparable from any other aspect of the world. Nothing says, “it just is”, better than the sequence of Motoko Kusanagi’s quiet traversal of Ghost in the Shell’s mega-urban hive, a glimpse of another her through the window of a passing skyscraper, the downcast gaze of a basset hound on a bridge, the piercing sunlight shot down an alleyway...parts of Gibson’s Idoru, Peter Chung’s Aeon Flux, and yes, even the third Matrix movie (I said what I said), manage to get very, very close. Then there’s the matter of Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days, which seems to be a primary influence on Edgerunners’ Californian Inferno, Night City. Strange Days falls into the category of art that I respect but do not like, and the confusing politics of Bigelow’s other
But! This post isn’t about the work of a probable CIA propagandist who also made a great surf heist flick, it’s about anime! It’s no secret to anyone who knows me that I think (pre-rebuild) Neon Genesis Evangelion is the greatest piece of narrative art ever created, full stop, so it should come as no surprise that I’ve watched everything Studio Gainax has produced, as well as much of the output of one of their successors, Studio Trigger. I love the style & pacing of director Hiroyuki Imaishi’s work - Kill La Kill and Gurren Lagann are certified bangers, and the bluray of Promare just turned up on my doorstep, so I couldn’t have picked a better currently-active anime studio to bring the western RPG world of Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City to life.
The first series made a strong emotional impact on me, and given its popularity, it seems to have done that for a lot of other people as well. That series’ arc was brought to such a perfect conclusion that, again without spoilers, I wasn’t ever expecting we’d get more of David & Lucy’s story. But even if series one’s ending hadn’t felt so conclusive, I’m glad that series two introduces a whole new cast of characters, and that it feels like a sufficiently new vibe to distinguish it from series one. I’d say that, at this point in media, I’m more interested in anthologies than I am in huge endless stories - show me multiple limited views, don’t bother trying to make a panopticon. That’s one of my hopes for any future Resident Evil films, for example: rather than having Zack Cregger continue to steer a rebooted franchise, let other directors make their stand-alone RE films. Even if some (probably most) of those films would end up being unappealing to me personally, where IP is concerned, I’m in favour of diversity over purity.
I‘ll leave off by saying that the skate video head in me loves the choice to give audience surrogate character Roman a Sony VX camcorder, as his preferred technological means of interacting with the world. He eschews both cyborg enhancements and contemporary media, and prefers to watch actual films (rather than Braindances) and to document the world with old tech. Since the VX is the most iconic camera used to make skate videos in particular, this small detail goes a long way as far as worldbuilding goes. It’s not all about endless lore - one small detail can accomplish more than a hundred expanded universe tracts.